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Presbyterians In Educational Work In 
North Carolina Since 1813 



Address at the Centennial Celebration of the Synod of North Carolina, in 
Alamance Church, Guilford County, October 7. 1913. 



By C, Alphonso Smith, 

Pot Professor of English in the University of Virginia. 



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In Exchange 
Univ. of North Carolina 
SEP 2 7 1933 






PRESBYTERIANS IN EDUCATIONAL WORK 
IN NORTH CAROLINA SINCE 1813 

Address at the Centennial Celebration of the Synod of North Carolina, in 
Alamance Church, Guilford County, October 7, 1913. 

By C. Alphonso Smith, 

Poe Professor of English in the University of Virginia. 

No one can read the history of North Carolina without con- 
ceding to Presbyterians both priority and primacy in education- 
Indeed those who are not Presbyterians have paid tribute to 
Presbyterian influence in education more unreservedly than have 
Presbyterians themselves. Dr. Kemp P. Battle*, a distinguished 
Episcopalian, says that the Scotch-Irish, another name for 
Presbyterians, gave to North Carolina not only many of its 
leaders in peace and war — the Grahams and Jacksons and John- 
stons and Brevards and Alexanders and Mebanes and hosts of 
others, "but, above all, most of its faithful and zealous instruc- 
tors of youth, such as Dr. David Caldwell, of Guilford, and 
Dr. Joseph Caldwell, of the University, Dr. David Ker** and Mr. 
Charles Wilson Harrisf, the first professors in the University, 
and that progenitor of a line of able and cultured teachers and 
founder of a school eminent for nearly a century for its wide- 
spread and multiform usefulness, William BinghamJ, the first." 

Dr. Charles Lee Raper§, a Methodist and dean of the graduate 
department in the University of North Carolina, after mention- 

* History of the University of North Carolina (1907) I, 38. 

**Dr. David Ker (175S-180)) was not only the first professor to be called to the University but as 
"presiding professor" lie was the first executive or president. He had been a Presbyterian 
preacher and teacher in Fayetteville. 

tMr. Charles Wilson Harris (died 1801), professor of mathematics at the University was the sec- 
ond professor called to the new institution. He organized the first literary society nt the Lniver- 
sity, was for a time "presiding professor," and suggested the name oi lis liiendanJ fellow-Prince- 
tonian, Joseph Caldwell, to succeed himself in the chair of mathematics. 

+He had preached and taught in Wilmington before coming to the University as professor of 
Latin in 1801. He resigned in 1805 to become the founder of Bingham School. Of his son, Wil- 
liam James Bingham (1802-1S66), father of William Bingham, the author, and of Major Itol.ert 
Bingham, the present distinguished principal of Bingham Scl ool, Mr. Waller P. Williamson fays 
(in Our Living and Our Dead, II, p. 372): "I venture to say he was the means of putting more 
teachers upon the rostrum, more professional men into the various professions, more preachers 
in the pulpit, and.more missionaries into the field than any ten other men in the Stitte." 

%The Church and Private Schools of Xorlh Carolina (1898). p. 31. 



ing such Presbyterian schools and churches as Sugar Creek, 
Poplar Tent, Centre, Bethany, Buffalo, Thyatira, Grove, Wil- 
mington, and the schools and churches of Orange and Granville 
Counties presided over by the famous Henry Pattillo, declares 
that "The Presbyterians have been more thoroughly devoted 
to education than any other denomination. It has meant life 
as well as light to them; it has made them independent and 
patriotic, strong and noble. They were really our first teachers, 
and during the latter half of the eighteenth century they were 
well-nigh our only ones." "In North Carolina, as in several 
other States," says Dr. Charles Lee Smith*, a Baptist, and the 
only historian of education in the State, "the higher education 
owes its first impulse to the Presbyterian Church and Princeton 
College. To the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians occupying Central 
and Piedm nt Carolina is due the lasting honor of having es- 
tablished the first academies in the Province, and it is said that 
it was through their influence that the clause providing for a 
university was inserted in the initial Constitution of the State." 
No further testimony is needed to show that in educational 
work in the State the Presbyterian Church has been first and 
foremostf . It shall be my purpose not to trace the history of 
Presbyterian schools, not to speak of what the Synod as a Synod 
has done, but to put the emphasis on a few great Presbyterian 
leaders. There are six names that seem to me both typical and 
representative. I shall try to individualize these and to indi- 
cate the distinctive achievement of each. These names, if I 
understand their significance, not only link the years of the cen- 
tury into oneness of aim and achievement but project the light 
of a larger promise into the new century upon which the Synod 
of North Carolina today enters. 

I. David Caldwell (1725-1824). 

There is no difficulty in selecting our first most representa- 
tive figure, for when the Synod of North Carolina was formed 

*The History of Education in North Carolina (1888), pp. 23, 52. 

tin 1810 the University of North Carolina conferred three D. D.'s and five M. A.'s. Each one 
of the eight recipients was a Presbyterian preacher who taught as well as preached in Central 
or Piedmont Carolina. It looked very much like a called meeting of Orange Presbytery. See 
Battle's History of the University of North Carolina I, 186. 



3 



a hundred years ago the most famous educator in the South 
was David Caldwell. He was eighty-eight years old at this 
time and had only recently begun to show the physical marks 
of age. His mind, however, was still vigorous, his memory 
tenacious, his humor unfailing, his will unbroken, and his ap- 
pearance majestic. Only a few months before, when Virginia 
had been threatened by a British invasion in the war of 1812 
and volunteers were called for from Guilford County, Dr. Cald- 
well had been helped up the steps of the old court house to make 
the appeal. His text was: "He that hath no sword, let him 
sell his garment and buy one." So ardent was the old Dominie's 
patriotism and so irresistible his message that not only did more 
than the required number of Guilford men start forthwith for 
Virginia, but among them a young Quaker found himself. Bid- 
ding defiance to all inherited and acquired convictions this young 
man served faithfully in the ranks and returned to attest not 
so much the willingness of one Southern State to help another 
as the impossibility of standing unmoved before David Caldwell 
when David Caldwell was aflame with a great theme. 

At this time, however, Dr. Caldwell was already looked upon 
as belonging more to the past than to the present. But what a 
past it had been! This man's life had spanned the most dramatic 
transition of modern history. He was born when Peter the 
Great, of Russia, lay dying. He had lived under George I, 
George II, George III, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madi- 
son. He was to die under the presidency of Monroe. He had 
corresponded since early manhood with his friend, the great 
Dr. Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia, "the Sydenham of Amer- 
ica." Pastor of Alamance and Buffalo Churches since 1768, 
his fame as preacher, teacher, physician and patriot far trans- 
cended State lines. Students had come to him from every 
section of the country south of the Potomac. From his log 
school-room, which was also his home, there had gone forth 
five governors and more than fifty ministers. He had been a 
member of the State Constitutional Convention of 1788, and 
was the first to whom the presidency of the new university had 
been offered. He was more familiar with the earlier and later 
stages of the Revolutionary War in North Carolina than any 



other man, living or dead. He had been with the members of 
his two congregations when they fought at Alamance and at 
Guilford Court House. A price had been set upon his head. 
He had reasoned with Governor Tryon, argued with Cornwallis, 
and counseled with General Greene. 

The greatest personal loss that had come to him was in the 
wanton and deliberate burning of his books, letters, and manu- 
scripts of every kind. His family was compelled to stand idly 
by and see armful after armful of these memorials of an heroic 
past dumped by the British into the flaming oven in the Doctor's 
back yard. Though his books were his tools, Dr. Caldwell was 
often heard to say that he regretted most of all the loss of his 
private papers. Had these been preserved I believe that Dr. 
Caldwell's name would appear in every history of the American 
Revolution, while now it appears in none, and that the part 
played by North Carolinians i^ that great struggle would never 
have been subject to either cavil or question. 

All honor to your second pastor, men of Alamance and Buffalo, 
Dr. Eli W. Caruthers. Had he not written the life of Dr. Cald- 
well, the name of the great educator would today be but a rumor. 
Dr. Caruthers could not, however, in 1842 make amends for 
British barbarism in 1781, but he did what he could. Like 
Walter Scott's Old Mortality, who found pleasure in cleansing 
the gravestones of the martyred Covenanters, Dr. Caruthers 
has lovingly removed the mosses and lichens from the grave of a 
great man. He has thus rescued and restored the name and 
fame of one who would otherwise have been but a drifting tra- 
dition. 

A teacher's eminence may be measured in part by the eminence 
of his contemporaries; his services, by the achievements of his 
pupils. On both counts Dr. Calwdell's fame is enhanced. He 
had as contemporaries such Presbyterian teachers as Dr. John 
Makemie Wilson (1769-1831) and Dr. James Hall (1744-1826). 
Both had gone with him in 1810 to receive the degree of Doctor 
of Divinity from the University of North Carolina. Dr. Wilson, 
a playmate of Andrew Jackson, had opened a classical academy 
one year before the Synod of North Carolina was formed and in 
twelve years he had trained twenty-five Presbyterian ministers. 



Dr. Hall, a scientist, theologian, educator, scholar, and soldier, 
reminds one of "the spacious times of Great Elizabeth," when 
men, uncertain whether the pen was really mightier than the 
sword, compromised by handling both with equal skill. A 
special interest attaches to this warrior-preacher at our centen- 
nial celebration because as a delegate from Orange Presbytery 
he had served as Moderator of the General Assembly in Phila- 
delphia and because he was the Moderator of the Synod of the 
Carolinas when it met for the last time as a combined Synod in 
1812. 

Among Dr. Caldwell's graduates we shall mention only three 
but each added a distinct chapter to educational achievement 
in North Carolina. Rev. Samuel E. McCorkle, D. D., (1746- 
1811) was offered the first professorship in the University of 
North Carolina but declined. He was the orator of the day on 
that famous October 12, 1793, when the cornerstone of the Old 
East was laid. The first graduating class at the University 
numbered seven, of whom six had been pupils of Dr. McCorkle. 
In the first Board of Trustees of the new University he was the 
only preacher and the only teacher. He was the author of the 
by-laws of the University, which contained also courses of study 
for all the classes; and his famous academy, Zion- Parnassus, 
at Thyatira, six miles west of Salisbury, had the first normal 
school in America. Archibald D. Murphey (1777-1832), another 
pupil, said in 1827: "The usefulness of Dr. Caldwell to the liter- 
ature of North Carolina will never be sufficiently appreciated." 
The same has often been said of Murphey himself. "When our 
history is written," says W. J. Peele*, "if greatness is measured 
by the public benefit it confers, perhaps Macon, Murphey, and 
Vance will stand together as the three greatest men the State 
has yet produced." In 1817, as chairman of the committee 
appointed by the preceding legislature, Mr. Murphey filed his 
famous report on education. "I doubt if a more able and schol- 
arly report," says James Y. Joyner, Superintendent of Public 
Instruction, "was ever filed by any man on any subject in any 
North Carolina legislature." John Motley Morehead (1796- 
1866), twice governor of North Carolina, attended Dr. Caldwell's 

*Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians (1898) p. 125. 



school when his teacher was ninety years old but when his ability 
as an educator and his range as a scholar were, in Governor 
Morehead's opinion, worthy of all praise. John Motley More- 
head became distinctively our greatest industrial governor, but 
he made educational history when he founded in Greensboro 
the famous Edgeworth Female Seminary, the only school for 
women in the State founded and owned by an individual. It 
lasted from 1840 to 1871 and its grateful anji loyal alumnae 
may still be found in every Southern State. 

Though dead nearly a hundred years, Dr. Caldwell reminds 
us better than any other teacher in our history that education 
means the development of personality through contact with 
personality. His students did not go to a library, a laboratory, 
a faculty, or even a school or college. They went to David 
Caldwell. He died just as the forces that tend to institution- 
alize and impersonalize education were girding themselves for 
the century-long contest. They are in the saddle today but the 
time is coming when the voice of the old Dominie, like the voice 
of Johnny Armstrong^ the old ballad, will be heard 

"Saying, Tight on, my merry men all, 

And see that none of you be ta'en, 
For I will stand by and bleed but awhile, 

And then will I come and fight again.' " 

II. Joseph Caldwell (1773-1835). 

When David Caldwell died in 1824 the sceptre passed to 
Joseph Caldwell, first President of the University of North Caro- 
lina. Though not related one to the other the two men had 
much in common. Both were of Scotch-Irish descent, the elder 
from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the younger from New 
Jersey; both were graduates of Princeton; both were preachers 
as well as teachers; both were students of science as well as of 
the classics; both were men of affairs as well as of books; both 
fought persistently and successfully the forces of French infi- 
delity that were making rapid headway in the new republic; 
and both lived long enough to glimpse the after-glow of their 
own widening fame. The difference between them was one 
chiefly of temperament. There was a sweetness, a balance, 



a poise and patience about David Caldwell which, if not con- 
spicuously lacking, were not distinctively present, in the charac- 
ter of Joseph Caldwell. The first president drove from Prince- 
ton to Chapel Hill in a sulky arriving in time to take the chair 
of mathematics at the beginning of the session of 1796. He was 
twenty-three years old and the University one year old. 

From the opening of the University until the enforced resig- 
nation of President David Lowry Swain in Reconstruction times 
the University was presided over continuously by Presbyter- 
ians. For the first nine years of its existence (1795-1804) there 
was no president but a presiding professor. The two presiding 
professors*, before Dr. Caldwell became president in 1804, had 
been Dr. David Ker and Mr. Charles Wilson Harris, both Pres- 
byterians. Of his Professor ot Latin, William Bingham, a 
Scotch-Irishman of Ulster, and an honor graduate of the Uni- 
versity of Glasgow, Dr. Caldwell afterwards wrote: "Whoever 
shall have occasion to be acquainted with this man shall find 
him to be one of those whom the great poet of England has de- 
nominated to be among 'the noblest works of God.' 

Joseph Caldwell found himself, then, among congenial col- 
leagues. As first president of the oldest State University in 
America he occupied a position of rare opportunity but of almost 
unexampled difficulty. There was no precedent to follow and 
no one to whom he could turn for assured guidance in that dim 
neutral belt of authority that lay between the Faculty on the 
one hand, the Board of Trustees and the Legislature on the other. 
He resigned once with the intention of devoting himself ex- 
clusively to the study of higher mathematics, his favorite field; 
but at the end of three years he was unanimously re-elected to 
his old position which he held till his death in 1835. During 
these years the University grew rapidly in renown, in resources, 
in fruitful scholarship, and in public service. The man and the 
place had met. 

Dr. Caldwell was not only a scholar and administrator; he 
was a great citizen. He advocated so ably the building of rail- 
roads that he was called the father of internal improvements. 
"So long," said Paul C. Cameron, "as the great trunk line rail- 
road from Morehead City shall increase the wealth and com- 



merce of the State, the name of Caldwell will be remembered 
as its first projector in the letters of 'Carlton.' " He was ap- 
pointed scientific expert to run the boundary line between North 
and South Carolina in 1813. He erected a building in which 
to use the costly astronomical instruments bought by him in 
London, and thus inaugurated the first college observatory in 
the United States. He was so ardent an advocate of common 
schools and academies that the new Presbyterian institute at 
Greensboro, established a year after his death, was promptly 
named for him. Among its earliest teachers were Dr. Alexander 
Wilson, Mr. Silas C. Lindsay, and Rev. John A. Gretter. "This 
trio," said Dr. Charles Phillips, ' 'taught a school of the highest 
pretensions ever known in North Carolina. Its students joined 
the junior class in the University." Six years after Dr. Cald- 
well's death his name was given to Caldwell County, the first 
county in the State to honor the name of a teacher. 

Near the top of the monument erected on the campus of the 
University "by the President of the United States, the Governor 
of North Carolina, and other alumni" to the memory of Dr. 
Caldwell may be seen a railroad wheel, an engineer's transit, 
and the Bible. The union of these symbols, rather than the 
symbols themselves, together with the inscription on the south 
face — "He was an early, conspicuous, and devoted advocate of 
the cause of common schools and internal improvements in 
North Carolina" — indicate the public services by which Dr. 
Caldwell received and will retain the lasting gratitude and 
affection both of the Presbyterian Church and of the State of 
his early adoption. 

III. Elisha Mitchell (1793-1857). 

During Dr. Caldwell's absences from the University the 
position of acting president had always fallen to Professor 
Elisha Mitchell. Immediately after Dr. Caldwell's death 
Dr. Mitchell was made president pro tern and filled the position 
till the election and arrival of President David Lowry Swain. 
Dr. Mitchell was a graduate of Yale in the class with Denison 
Olmsted, James Longstreet, author of Georgia Scenes, and George 



E. Badger, Senator and Secretary of the Navy. Dr. Olmsted, 
a Presbyterian, was his colleague at Chapel Hill for a short 
time and it was these two men who began the great work of 
making the soil, the climate, and the resources of North Caro- 
lina known to the citizens of the State and to those far beyond 
the State. 

Dr. Mitchell came to Chapel Hill in 1818 and was ordained 
a Presbyterian minister in 1821. Till 1825 he filled the chair 
of mathematics and natural philosophy but when Dr. Olmsted 
was called from Chapel Hill to Yale Dr. Mitchell entered upon 
his chosen field of geology and mineralogy. During his thirty- 
nine years of service he grew steadily in mental stature, in use- 
fulness to the State, and in the esteem of all who knew him. 
"His massive, tireless frame," says Dr. Battle*, "his encyclo- 
pedic information and readiness to impart it, his broad humor, 
his firm but not narrow Calvinism, his genial manners, his la- 
borious reading, his kindness of heart and unfailing generosity, 
his intrepid spirit, his firm reliance on his opinions, would have 
made him conspicuous anywhere." 

It was an able faculty in which he served, the Presbyterian 
members alone constituting a body of men of whom any univer- 
sity might be proud. Of President Swain, an elder in the Pres- 
byterian Church, Governor Vancef said: "He who would fully 
comprehend the great work of David Swain's life would have 
to stand upon the battlements of heaven and survey the moral 
world with an angel's ken." There was also Dr. James Phillips, 
Presbyterian minister and professor of mathematics, whose 
public services, if they have suffered eclipse at all, have suffered 
it because they have been overshadowed by the combined ser- 
vices of his son, Dr. Charles Phillips, and his daughter, Mrs. 
Cornelia Phillips Spencer. When some one said in Governor 
Vance's presence that Mrs. Spencer was the brainiest woman 
in the State, he replied promptly: "Yes, and man, too." 

Able as were his friends and colleagues, however, Elisha 
Mitchell seems to me to have made a deeper and more personal 
impress upon the State than any of them. He was the first 

*History of the University of North Carolina I, 681. 

tW. J. Peele's lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, p. 244. 



10 



who saw clearly, and wrought for a lifetime to make patent and 
potent, the vision of physical North Carolina, — its illimitable 
wealth of forest and field and mountain, its hidden ores, its 
majestic waterways, its cities and sanatariums, its workshops 
and factories and, above all, its lone mountain peak, unequalled 
but unacknowledged. He knew no Eastern Carolina or Western 
Carolina but only North Carolina as God made it. He became 
a martyr not to science in general but to the scientific develop- 
ment of North Carolina. His death on the highest peak of 
the Blue Ridge, which he had proved to be the highest, swept 
the State with a wave of patriotic and personal devotion un- 
paralleled in our history. Of the many resolutions which his 
death called forth none seem to me quite so beautifully phrased 
as those from Davidson College: "Through the whole of a long 
life he was an assiduous and enthusiastic devotee of science, and 
to us there is something of a melancholy, poetic grandeur and 
greatness in the place and manner of his death, whereby science 
in burying one of her worthiest sons has hallowed a new Pisgah, 
which future generations shall know and mark." 

Dr. Mitchell lives today not because Mt. Mitchell and the 
Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society and Mitchell County perpet- 
uate his name but because he wrought at a splendid design. 
He did not live to complete it — it is not completed yet — but by 
scientific reports in many national journals, by special articles 
in magazines and newspapers, by personal appeals in season 
and out of season, by repeated visits and prolonged investiga- 
tions, he affected powerfully the public opinion of his time and 
left- North Carolina a richer, a wiser, a more forward-looking 
State than he had found it. I can never read Browning's great 
poem, The Grammarian' s Funeral, without thinking of the burial 
of Dr. Mitchell. As the grammarian's pallbearers ascended 
the mountain they chanted, you remember, the praises of their 
hero, catching more and more of his spirit as they neared the 
far summit: 

"That low man seeks a little thing to do, 

Sees it and does it: 
This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 

Dies ere he knows it. 



11 

That low man goes on adding one to one, 

His hundred's soon hit: 
This high man, aiming at a million, 

Misses an unit. 

Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, 

Clouds form, 
Lightnings are loosed, 

Stars come and go. 

Lofty designs must close in like effects: 

Loftily lying, 
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects, 

Living and dying." 

IV. William Joseph Martin (1830-1896). 

Dr. Mitchell was succeeded by William J. Martin. He was 
a native of Virginia, had been a graduate student of the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, and for three years had served with dis- 
tinguished success as professor of natural philosophy and chem- 
istry at Washington College, now Washington and Jefferson 
College, Washington, Pennsylvania. He succeeded at once 
in securing a large appropriation for laboratory work at the 
University of North Carolina and thus put the study of chem- 
istry upon a higher and more scientific plane than it had before 
occupied. On September 21, 1861, after drilling the students 
in military tactics, he resigned his chair and entered the Con- 
federate Army. After serving as Captain of the Twenty-eighth 
North Carolina Infantry he was made Lieutenant-Colonel of 
the Eleventh, the famous "Bethel Regiment." After the Battle 
of Gettysburg he was made Colonel. Four times wounded his 
commission as General had just been signed when the surrender 
at Appomattox gave him again to the cause of education. After 
serving two years longer at Chapel Hill, he founded the Colum- 
bian High School at Columbia, Tennessee, was elected professor 
of chemistry at Davidson College in 1869, and arrived at his 
new post in 1870. Here his life work began and here his fame 
as a teacher and moulder of men was established. 

Davidson College had opened its doors in 1837. No more 
favorable place for a Presbyterian college could have been found 
in the entire South. Not far from its site had flourished such 
classical schools as Crowfield, Sugar Creek, Queen's Museum, 



12 



Zion-Parnassus, Providence, Rocky River, Poplar Tent, and 
Bethany, all under Presbyterian control. Though founded 
long after the Revolutionary War, Davidson College gathered 
up and conserved the best traditions of that heroic age and took 
its name from General William Davidson, a noted Revolutionary 
soldier, on whose broad acres the college was built and whose 
heroic death at Cowan's Ford had hallowed both his name and 
his estate. Among the presidents of Davidson College who have 
passed to their reward may be mentioned Dr. Robert Hall 
Morrison, Dr. Samuel Williamson, Dr. Drury Lacy, Dr. J. L. 
Kirkpatrick, and Dr. George Wilson McPhail. When Colonel 
Martin came to Davidson it already counted on its honor-roll 
of professors such men as General D. H. Hill, soldier and litter- 
ateur, Washington C. Kerr, who as State geologist continued 
the work of Elisha Mitchell, Dr. Charles Phillips, who helped 
Dr. Kemp P. Battle and Mrs. Spencer to lift the University 
out of the chaos of Reconstruction, and many others who had 
given the institution high rank throughout the South, a rank 
more than maintained from that day to this. 

Colonel Martin's professorship, lasting from 1869 to 1896, 
is still the longest in the history of Davidson. From 1880 to 
1884 it was my privilege to know him in his class room and in 
his home, and of all the college professors under whom it has 
been my lot to sit, my heart and head yield first place to William 
J. Martin. As a teacher it was not his scholarship that made 
the deepest impression, though his scholarship was ample and 
constantly renewed. It was first of all his ability to distinguish 
with lightning rapidity between the essential and the non-es- 
sential. He pierced instantly to the centre of a subject and 
expounded it from the centre outward, not from the circumfer- 
ence inward. His philosophy seemed to be, "Take care of the 
centre and the circumference will take care of itself." In his 
presence I felt a new reverence for nuclear fact and nuclear truth. 
Chemistry did not seem to be an end in itself but rather one of 
the windows through which Nature peered to let us know how 
she looked and how she acted. 

It has always seemed to me that with but little additional 
training Colonel Martin would have made a great teacher of 



13 



history, literature, sociology, or anything else, not because his 
range was wide but because his vision was central and unerring. 
His method was essentially that of the soldier, — he captured 
the outworks only as an incident in his march to the citadel. 
Prescott tells us that the secret of the brilliant victory won by 
Cortes over the Aztecs at the Battle of Otumba was that the 
Spanish commander, disregarding the two hundred thousand 
Aztec soldiers that stood in front of his little band, ordered his 
men to strike straight for the person of the commander-in-chief. 
"There is our mark"! said he. "Follow and support me!" 
That was Colonel Martin's method and it is a method as appli- 
cable to the study of literature as to the study of chemistry, to 
the conduct of life as to the attainment of learning. But I am 
sure that I speak for all those who knew Colonel Martin when I 
say that the man was greater than the professor. He taught 
chemistry professionally, he impressed manhood unconsciously. 
We were predisposed to admire him, for we knew that this prompt 
and resilient figure had come to us, like Little Giffen of Ten- 
nessee, 

"Out of the focal and foremost fire, 

Out of the hospital walls as dire." 

I never heard him allude even remotely to the war, but the 
sulphurous fumes in his laboratory spoke "to my imagination of 
battle, and the imperial figure that moved amid them was al- 
ways that of the Confederate soldier, the "gentleman unafraid." 

It has been said that higher education in the South was re- 
tarded shortly after the war because so many Confederate sold- 
iers became teachers, the implication being that the four years 
given to battle might more profitably have been given to books. 
The charge rests on a curious misconception of what higher 
education means. If it means bookishness, the charge has 
much to support it. But if it means manhood, self-reliance, 
disciplined conduct, instant obedience to authority, the ability 
to ally oneself for life or death with a great cause, then I know 
no breed of men to whom the South owes more than to her 
soldier teachers, her Robert E. Lee, her D. H. Hill, her Robert 
Bingham, her William J. Martin. 



14 
V. Calvin Henderson Wiley (1819-1887). 

But if Presbyterian educators have profoundly influenced 
college and university standards, they have had an even greater 
influence upon the common schools. From 1861 to 1865 the 
colleges and universities of the South found themselves depopu- 
lated. Students had become soldiers. The University of North 
Carolina, Davidson College, Wake Forest, and Trinity either 
closed their doors or ministered to a constantly diminishing 
student-body. But a still greater peril threatened: it was that 
the common schools might be closed and the money collected 
for them used for war purposes. That our schools were not 
closed and that the funds were not diverted is due to one man, 
Calvin Henderson Wiley. To him belongs the greatest single- 
armed achievement in the history of public instruction in the 
South. If Caldwell Institute in Greensboro had done nothing 
else than prepare this man for college, it would have justified 
its existence and vindicated the faith of its founders. North 
Carolina had already produced men to whom the common schools 
were a theory, a possibility, even an ideal. With Calvin H. 
Wiley they were a passion. 

Dr. Wiley's life was uneventful except for the new ideas at 
which he wrought. He did not find the handle of his being 
until 1852. From 1845 to 1852 his ambition was to make the 
history of North Carolina known at home and abroad through 
historical novels. I have always had a peculiar sympathy and 
admiration for him in this effort. It bespoke the patriot and 
the far-sighted patriot. If the history of North Carolina is 
ever to become a part of the cultural consciousness of men, as 
I believe it is destined to become, it must be interpreted by the 
constructive imagination as well as by the analytic reason. It 
must be told not merely in chronicle and textbook but in song 
and story. In Scotland it is said that every spot has its legend 
and every stream sings its song. But it was not the historians 
that made it so : it was Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Nobody 
in North Carolina had seen this so clearly, I think, as Dr. Wiley. 
To put his ideas into effect he published in New York in 1847 
a novel called Alamance, or the Great and Final Experiment. 



15 



Chapter 47 describes the Battle of Guilford Court House, and 
Dr. David Caldwell is one of the leading characters. In 1849 
appeared Roanoke, or Where is Utopia? This novel was pub- 
lished in London under the title of Old Dan Tucker and his Son 
Walter, a Tale of North Carolina. In 1852 his last novel was 
published in Philadelphia and was called Life in the South: a 
Companion to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Strange to say, it is a story 
of the eighteenth century ending with the Battle of Moore's 
Creek Bridge. But more astonishing still is the beginning: 
"Whoever will examine the map of North Carolina will at once 
be struck with the fact that Providence did not design the State 
for a commercial one . . . The wild and restless demon of 
Progress has not yet breathed there its scorching breath on the 
green foliage of nature." Plainly Dr. Wiley had not yet found 
himself. 

But in 1852 he was elected our first superintendent of educa- 
tion and a new era in North Carolina history began. From 
1852 to 1865, when the position of superintendent was abolished, 
Dr. Wiley was the foremost common school advocate in the Un- 
ited States*. These figures tell their own story: In 1853 there 
were 800 teachers in the public schools of North Carolina; in 
1860 there were 2,286. In 1853 there were 83,373 pupils; in 
1860 there were 116,567. In 1853 the receipts were $192,250; 
in 1860 they were $408,566. In 1858 North Carolina had a 
larger school fund than Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, New 
Jersey, Massachusetts, or Maine. 

Dr. Wiley continued his activity in behalf of the public 
schools till his death in 1887. His fame was national and he 
was a familiar platform figure in many States. In 1866 he was 
ordained a Presbyterian minister. But his greatest work was 
done between 1852 and 1865. The monument erected to him 
in Winston in 1904 bears this inscription: "Erected by the pupils 
of the Graded Schools of Winston to the memory of the Rev. 
Calvin H. Wiley, D. D., as one of the founders of the schools 
of this city and as the father of the public school system of 
North Carolina." But the best comment on his service is 

*Horace Mann, with whom Dr. Wiley is often compared, became president of Antioch College 
in 1852 and died in 1859. 



16 



found in his last report made to Governor Jonathan Worth, 
January 16, 1866: u To the lasting honor of North Carolina^ 
her public schools survived the terrible shock of cruel war, and 
the State of the South which furnished most material and the 
greatest number and the bravest troops to the war did more 
than all the others for the cause of popular education." Well 
does Superintendent James Y. Joyner say*: "If ever man 
was inspired and called of God to a work, Calvin H. Wiley seems 
to me to have been inspired and called to his." 

VI. Charles Duncan McIver (1860-1906). 

When Calvin H. Wiley died, Dr. McIver was principal of the 
literary department of Peace Institute in Raleigh; when Colonel 
Martin died, Dr. McIver was president of the State Normal 
and Industrial College for Women in Greensboro. During 
these nine years no one brain in North Carolina developed more 
rapidly than his and no one man did a work of vaster or more 
beneficent import. 

I need not dwell upon his life. You know it as well as I. 
You men and women of Buffalo and Alamance and Greensboro 
can still see his hurrying Scotch figure moving upon the streets 
of the city that guards his remains. His interests and activities 
were many, but one purpose, one passion dominated them all. 
He belongs with Dr. Wiley rather than with any of the others 
whom I have mentioned. Neither he nor Dr. Wiley was a great 
teacher or a great scholar in the modern sense. They were 
moulders of public opinion rather than of individual lives. It 
was the multitude rather than the one man that sent the chal- 
lenge to their souls. When the crisis came they confronted a 
whole State, a State that was either openly opposed to them 
or passively indifferent. They said to the State: "I am no 
better than you and no wiser; but in this one matter I see more 
clearly than you. I will not go to you; you shall come to me." 
And the State came. 

When Dr. McIver was called to Peace Institute, the education 
of women at State expense had no strong advocates in North 

fAddreas at the Unveiling of the Monument to Calvin H. Wiley, at Winston, September 9, 1904. 



17 



Carolina. The Presbyterian Church, it is true, had given to 
the cause of woman's education such men as Professor Richard 
Sterling and Rev. J. M. M. Caldwell (grandson of Dr. David 
Caldwell), both at Edgeworth Female Seminary in Greensboro. 
It had given Dr. Robert Burwell and his son, Captain John B. 
Burwell, the first principals of Peace Institute. But Dr. Mc- 
Iver's conception of woman's education does not seem to me to 
have been suggested or even remotely influenced by his Pres- 
byterian predecessors. 

Dr. Mclver's distinctive contribution to the educational his- 
tory of North Carolina lay in his advocacy of woman's education 
not as an end in itself but as a means of decreasing the alarm- 
ing illiteracy prevalent in the State. He and Dr. Wiley were 
thus making for the same goal, but they saw the goal f r om dif- 
ferent angles and approached it by different routes. Dr. Mc- 
lver's service to the State touched, it is true, every phase of 
educational effort; but his central and controlling thought 
from first to last is found in such sayings as these: "The cheap- 
est, easiest, and surest road to universal education is to educate 
those who are to be the mothers and teachers of future genera- 
tions." "An educated man may be the father of illiterate 
children, but the children of educated women are never illiter- 
ate." "The proper training of women is the strategic point in 
the education of the race." "Educate a man and you have 
educated one person, educate a mother and you have educated 
a whole family." "We could better afford to have five illiterate 
men than one illiterate mother." 

It is easy to say that the underlying thought in these selec- 
tions is not new. Perhaps it is not, though I for one have never 
seen the same thought expressed with half the same directness 
or sense of personal conviction. But Dr. Mclver's life work 
was not a new thought: it was a new era. No reformer builds 
on a new thought. He takes an old but unrealized thought, 
interprets it in terms of practice and policy, translates it from 
the passive voice into the active voice, dedicates himself to it, 
inscribes it on a banner, rallies the hostile and heedless to its 
defence, till at last it becomes self-supporting and self-propel- 
ling. This was Dr. Mclver's mission and this is the heritage 



18 



that he leaves to all reformers whether in church or state who in 
the long years may follow him. 

Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the story in meagre outline of 
some of the men whom the Presbyterian Church during the 
lifetime of this Synod has given to education in North Carolina. 
One hazards nothing in saying that if these six men had never 
lived or if they had devoted their constructive effort to more 
personal ends, the history of the State would have to be re- 
written. David Caldwell spoke for them all when he said: "I 
have never tried to be rich but only useful." It is the old but 
always uplifting story of a man's finding himself by losing him- 
self in a great but needy cause. David Caldwell was not David 
Caldwell till students began to flock to him and he felt the thrill 
of imparting light and leading to those who were to be the heralds 
of a new democracy and the builders of a new continent. Joseph 
Caldwell was himself re-made by the years in which he was 
shaping the destiny of a great commonwealth by shaping the 
destiny of its nascent university. Elisha Mitchell would have 
remained only Professor Mitchell of Yale had he not come to 
feel himself the trustee of the regnant promise of physical North 
Carolina. William J. Martin would have left an honored but 
not a loved name had not the call come, as it came to his great 
chieftain at Lexington, to beat his sword into a ploughshare and 
to till and plant for eternity. Calvin H. Wiley would have died 
an unknown lawyer or a would-be novelist had he not heard the 
pathetic voices of little children calling to him out of the dark. 
And Charles Duncan Mclver would still be teaching girls the 
exceptions in the Latin third declension had not a passion for 
human service flamed into his young life and burnt it to its un- 
timely but victorious end. 

"Heroes of old! I humbly lay 

The laurel on your graves again; 
Whatever men have done, men say, — 

The deeds you wrought are not in vain." 



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